


i took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart (i am, i am, i am)

by hitlikehammers



Series: Cardiophilia Sequence [12]
Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Cardiophilia, Character Study, Established Relationship, Extended Metaphors, Happy Ending, Heartbeat Kink, Heartbeats, Human Anatomy, Introspection, M/M, Musical References, Pulsepoint Kink, Retirement!lock, Romance, Schmoop, True Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-26
Updated: 2015-10-26
Packaged: 2018-04-28 07:20:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5082808
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hitlikehammers/pseuds/hitlikehammers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They conduct a symphony, here.</p><p>And, like all symphonies: they are coming to a close.</p><p> </p><p>(Final installment of <b><a href="http://archiveofourown.org/series/19654">The Cardiophilia Sequence</a></b>.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	i took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart (i am, i am, i am)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



> While I am uncertain whether anyone still cares: this long overdue final installment for **[The Cardiophilia Sequence](http://archiveofourown.org/series/19654)** is, in fact, what I had in mind from the outset—where I wanted it to go when I decided this would be a series, and the note on which I wanted it to end. I do sincerely hope it's worthwhile, and enjoyable to whoever chooses to read, and to each and every one of you who stood by this series and enjoyed even the smallest bit of it: I cannot properly express to you my gratitude.
> 
> This is un-Britpicked, because it is a gift to my long-suffering Sherlock beta, [speakmefair](http://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair), who I hope I don't disgrace in offering this as a present, quite belated.
> 
> And in addition to thanks in general, thanks in specific go to the lovely real-life friends I gained through this series, including the inimitable [RC_McLachlan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/RC_McLachlan), who was kinder than I deserved from the very start with her first comment, and was kinder again than I'd earned in glancing this over and confirming that it was indeed suitable for public consumption. All my love, doll <3
> 
> Title credit, perhaps fittingly in more ways than one, to [Sylvia Plath](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Sylvia_Plath).

They conduct a symphony, here.

The low buzz of the hive is all interwoven string, a low dance of percussive waves: the hum of action, of industry. The slow pull of being: oscillating at so very many intervals, yet never-ending. Always grasped and made anew.

The breath: ephemeral, almost by necessity. The _pneuma_ : the soul of the composition, the intangible _je ne sais quoi_ —the only sort he tolerates. The only kind he allows within order and revelation and unattainable certitude; between notes, eupneic, dyspnoeic, apnœic to the trembling of all things in calamitous rage, tachycardia in response, even now: untrained, untempered for less—ectopic in bed, in fear, in flirting with the grave unending; cardiodynic to the point of unravelling, to the point of agony beyond expression, or survival; to the point of arrest before recognition, the reassertion of structure, held most precious—

The beat. The beat, the beat, the beat: slowing, slowing, slower every moment, he knows—infinitesimal and yet his cells have hearkened and attuned across time, across so many inhales shared and evenings entwined and mornings that only dawned for the spark of life through forgiving muscle ever loosening, tightening, wearing every instant in the heat, in the touch, in the space between them that isn’t space at all, somehow: that defies all logic and sense and Sherlock will never comprehend it, the one mystery unsolved and he cannot abide the unknown, he cannot leave this plane of being for the cold ground before he understands, he cannot, they _cannot_ —

There are hands in his hair—conducting, systolic; _maestro_ : and the beat is strong, is steady. The breath eases, _calmando_ ; the hands counting the _takt_ , melodious, playing gentle down the curl of sound and strand against the scalp: salt and pepper where John’s gone milk and honey—aggregate complementation. Perfection.

The beat is slowing; slower. Sherlock feels it.

But his own answer is an answer that is drawn to pair, to match—all is well.

Or; well enough.

He breathes, inhales deep. The scent of sweetness on the air, of John’s skin and the musk of the yellowed pages of the book in his hands; the last gasp of fading blossoms on the trees—honeycomb and stillness and the effort of the universe to coalesce in this singular moment: Sherlock breathes it in and lets it settle, mesmerizing, filled with data and longing and still so infinitely contained. His own heart thrums within that single drop of being, and he can only ever be spurred to press further into John, the breathe deeper of this solitary man and listen, keep time by the way he ticks the seconds, by the give and take that he demands.

Sherlock breathes; inhales ever so _deep_.

He recalls, idly, a time when rhythm was overlooked, less anathema and more inconsequential: blindness. Amateur. He’d attempted to indulge himself, in the beginning, to assuage the failing, the blindness by reasoning that in the absence of stimuli, in the creation of false _noise_ , he grew to see lies like technicolour—in never quite knowing the balance that his own pulse ached for, and ever-seeking in the wrong, dank corners of the world for a filler, for a fix, he’d found what nihilism tasted like. He’d figured how to imagine notes where none existed, to substitute corrections where needed and to inhale them need into his lungs, unfiltered: unwavering.

He’d justified the way he ignored the _heart_ for so long by praising the work, and he’s not entirely wrong for it, he knows; it only feels that way, and feelings aren’t always so reliable as to base a world around them, as to chose a life for their sway. 

But he had picked up a bow before his own limbs had mastered motion, had eked out horrific cacophony and yet had _known_ that it was _right_ , beyond his mother’s indulgent nodding and his brother’s hateful sneer: he had known, even then.

The rhythm had shaped him, and refined him within his veins, without his knowledge or consent: concussive and abrasive as it coddled, as it soothed: built him of sixteenth notes and trills so that the waiting was a vibratory chasm, a horrific line of breath and blood and a heart too tight-strung to beat properly, to bring him real life. And the Work, the Game was a distraction, a leaping point for his shivering atria to pounce and grasp and hold; and the Boredom was a punishment, its Solution a in seventh chords above the root that trilled unto near-breaking, every time, and Sherlock wished for breaking, because it taunted, it teased—it felt like flying when death wandered close, and his heart shuddered to the point of pain, and Sherlock thought maybe that was his role, in the darkest of hours: maybe that was the masterpiece, some asymphony—deeper, denser than he’d used to dream as a child, flailing limbs. Screeching notes.

But _rhythm_ , even then, where he had none then to either breath, or beat, or thought.

It’s not that he doesn’t question the hows, it’s not that he can keep himself from calculating all the alternate ways it may have slipped together, spilled and intertwined, all the ways it might not have done at all—it’s not that Sherlock can quite sink into what he has, beyond all reason, and forget that he even as he knows, now, that he is made of blood and bone and heart, those components are still ordered in logic, rooted in sense, and so he cannot help but to question, but to wonder.

And yet, in Sherlock's blood there is a foothold, a hand outreached; in Sherlock's soul there is an imprint, and while his heart has always had to beat out of necessity, he can still remember the first time he felt it: the first time he watched the surge of life and love and feeling at the line of John’s throat and realized what the world could be; what it could hold—so much more than his calculations could have mustered, so much more than his Palace could have housed and kept from cold.

And there are still days where he cannot fathom it: that it’s real, that they’re here, that the first steps held fast, kept close enough to lead them to these last; he cannot believe, for reason or its mirror, that it was ever revealed to him, but then at the very same time, that he missed it for so long. He remembers staring, and feeling the thunder of what it means to breath and be envelop his body from outside, invite his entire self to revel in it and he had known the steps to the dance in an instant, and his soul had felt light for all that it was weighted, now; for all that it was buoyed and buried under the pressure of what it meant to keep a heart safe, where Sherlock had so long abused his own, unthinking. He couldn’t not, cannot believe that this resonance walked into his life unplanned, unprimed, and sang a siren’s call to his very cells: and for all evidence to the contrary that his bow never stroked the strings of his heart by chance or happenstance or sheer foolish whim, never tuned by accident those fibres, those filaments, those impossible chambers and taught them to listen, to beat if not yet to anticipate the conducting of real Light: for all that there is no evidence to trace, it was so, and remains.

Sherlock fears the unknown in it, sometimes, but John is steady, and steadfast, and warm, and in that, Sherlock cannot fear for long.

So when reason tries to sway him, to take him from the glow of _this_ , he presses further into that heat, that shine: further into John, who is all things, who is what it means to know the impossible, and who welcomes him, every time: unending.

It is a hollow gamble, a game transparent and illusive and all folly, perhaps, but it sings in Sherlock’s chest like a promise, because it beats in John’s chest like a boon, and Sherlock won’t forsake it; doesn’t care to follow reason in this, not just yet.

Because reason dictates finitude. There are impossibilities in this that he cannot eliminate, that his mind recognizes as truths woven long and unwavering into a fabric of being he'd long dismissed as irrelevant; that he's longer since wrapped himself close in and pleaded, in weakness, to work miracles.

They are coming to a close.

Sherlock sighs, and he has known the heart beneath him long enough, now— _through_ enough, now—to note the smile, to hear the curl of John’s lips in the quiver of the valves, the torrential sigh of blood through ventricle, through vein as John works fingers stiff with age, drawn with deep lines and pinched skin: flawless, the touch of wholeness against skin; Sherlock can hear the swift shimmering of joy against his ear where he lies prone against John’s chest, pressed close while John flips the pages, his breath rushing out as he starts a paragraph anew, reads with the aid of lenses perched at the tip of nose and Sherlock loves him with all that he is.

 _All_ that is, and ever was, more or less than _this_.

Sherlock sinks into sensation, then; closes his eyes and basks in what it means to feel the prickle of grass against his uncovered skin—what it is to listen, to be overwhelmed and overcome and enveloped wholly In the dawns forged for the life, and the twitch, and the press, the give made there to follow beneath his ear, still strong enough to _feel_ through the breast at his cheek: the volume of each stroke, each ventricular contraction with the very coruscation of life bursting around him and echoing soft, the last shimmer of firecrackers dying in the dark.

And biology counts by the billions, and from the first moment he could, the first moment he’d _seen_ , Sherlock knows to the skipped-half-beat what the score is, what the marks for or against or nether, simply present and true: Sherlock knows John’s heart like the paint-streaks in his Mind Palace, tracing the walls that only he can see and touch; Sherlock knows John’s heart from the inside out, imagine fully and realized in the base of his throat where he swallows around the reminder that life is worth living in every moment, breathes in through John’s being as often as he can: Sherlock knows.

But still, he grasps at knowing to cover the unknowable—incomplete data, skewed calculations: inaccurate. So much time, as a child perhaps too often scared, too many moment forced to will himself forward despite the flutter of a tiny, precious heart; or a soldier, too often steady for the battering, the beating taken to the beat in itself. Sherlock cannot know these things, not for certain. Extrapolations he’d allow elsewhere, that he’d trust for his own expertise in another context, in _any other context_ —volta, vivo, tanto—his hands grown spiderwebbed with age as he lays one palm flat over John’s steadying heart and forces himself to breathe, for John’s heart is still playful, still taken to skip and tumble in ways that terrify Sherlock until they are gone, save that they’re never wholly gone: John’s heart is slowing, they are slowing, but everything that truly matters, beyond time and wear and the mortal coil in itself—all that makes John _his_ , and keeps him, keeps them both, is still young. Still wild.

Still everything that Sherlock was born to know, and seek, and hold until the dying of his grasp, the staying of his blood.

Sherlock sighs, and presses lips to John’s clothed chest, holds there for instants that chain themselves into something significant, their bodies coinciding, their lifeblood moving counterpoint, and then to match, to build: a masterpiece.

They are, and always have been, composition unto themselves.

“Swap soon, yeah?” John’s voice is the ricochet of a bullet, the soft sweep of fingertips across a cheek gone damp for feeling; John’s voice is the wind and the buzzing of the bees—the promise of tomorrow, of every tomorrow but more than that: of _now_

“Of course,” Sherlock stretches, cranes his neck to meet John’s eyes above those spectacles—their warm never ceases to kindle something nameless in Sherlock’s chest, and Sherlock’s long since given up trying to find a word to suit it, not because he doesn’t wish to fit the feeling, but because he’s of the belief that no word exists; not for this. Not for them.

The sun’s just past its peak, now; the days are shortening, but only just. Slowing, in their own way.

Sherlock smiles softly at John, his hand still pressed to that sweetly beating heart, and they are here, after everything, amidst a later they could never have foreseen or dreamt, and if Sherlock believed in a power higher than himself he might have thanked it; and he does believe in such a power.

That power calls himself John, and Sherlock kisses the centre pointe of his collarbones in gratitude; elicits a satisfied hum and a soft smile, in kind.

“I’ll finish this chapter,” John murmurs, and lifts a hand to thread in Sherlock’s hair, lets Sherlock rest against his chest a little longer and just listen, before Sherlock holds John to his own chest and allows that same indulgence, that same necessity in reverse, save that he’ll stroke John’s hair from the very start, and linger at his temple until the pulse is made known at every pass, every time: every opportunity to be absolutely _sure_.

“You alright?” John asks, suddenly, and Sherlock doesn’t move, just relishes the way John’s heart beats steady: slower, yes, than yesterday, but so are they, so is this, so is the world they’ve carved for themselves and the slower they use what it left, the more they conserve what moments they’re granted, the better, perhaps.

The longer they can hold to this thing that is impossible, and yet possible where it lives in the beating of their hearts when they intertwine, when they sync to tense and give as one: miraculous.

“Mmm,” Sherlock nuzzles John’s sternum softly. “Fine.”

“Right,” John breathes out, and continues stroking Sherlock’s hair as he wraps up his reading before offering the text to Sherlock, who will read the same length twice, three times to match John’s pace, to give John the soft reprieve of Sherlock’s own heart pressed against him: near and sure. “Yes.”

Sherlock can almost hear the words John reads in the beat, the pace of his blood: Sherlock can almost hear the conductor’s commands drowned out by his own as the pace quickens here, and lags there, but for the most part remains as reliably present, burned bold and bright and deep in Sherlock’s body, his mind, his own heart for keeping as he charts the rhythm, and makes more soul-deep demands:

 _Da capo al_...

He sinks into John, once more—indulgent to a fault—and breathes wordless into his chest, into the stretched-wide spaces of his heart between beats, and hopes against all logic and reason that what he says, what he needs, what he prays in this will sink in and hold:

_infinito._

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](http://hitlikehammers.tumblr.com).


End file.
